After a patient undergoes lumbar spinal disc surgery, there is a need to install pedicle screws and stabilizing rods to support the vertebrae during the fusion process that takes place in the weeks after surgery. Pedicle screws are inserted into the vertebrae in positions or axes that are typically not in a straight line. Part of the reason for this misalignment is natural anatomy of the spine, and part is the inability to accurately place screws where they would ideally be placed because of adjacent tissue, weak points in the vertebrae structure, and also because screws may not always be placed evenly in several levels. To compensate for this misalignment, the screws have to be jointed, the heads must swivel and rotate, attachments have to be installed, and invariably the rods themselves have to be bent in a 3-dimensional space to fit the contour through this maze of misaligned screw heads and conforming rod clamps. These multiaxial screws and clamps are an attempt by pedicle screw manufacturers to help make a best-fit path for the rod, but they are cumbersome to install, unstable, and expensive. To make matters worse, the rods still sometimes have to be bent. Rod bending is a process that takes a good eye by the surgeon. Sometimes, the surgeon will have to make a template out of wire or soft tubing, and then go to the bench and try to form the rod with hand tools to fit the misaligned 3 dimensional contour. This is pretty much a trial and error process. This could be very frustrating and time consuming, and the entire surgical staff is held up until there is an acceptable fit of the rod to the screws.